1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to user data synchronization, and, more specifically, to communication methodologies for tracking and synchronizing data changes for users.
2. Description of the Background Art
Remote clients and mobile devices have traditionally relied on synchronizing set membership data with enterprise information systems (EIS systems) whenever connectivity is available by performing a complete synchronization event, usually at a user-specified opportunity. For example, a mobile device may have EIS connectivity when placed in a docking cradle. The mobile device performs a complete synchronization of set membership data, both upload and download, upon docking. For efficiency's sake, traditional mobile middleware servers cache data from a backend EIS to avoid repeated access. With some traditional techniques, the middleware server also facilitates the cache to be modeled for references and relationships of various flavors and allows device users to synchronize the data as coherent business objects while ensuring consistency through modifications that could be effected for the data at each node in the system.
However, these traditional data synchronization methods do not ensure coherency and consistency between occasionally refreshed cached-copies of sets of data users have “subscribed to” on clients and EIS data. This is because in traditional systems, problems arise when cached copies of EIS data on clients such as laptops, desktop computers, HTML5-enabled browser applications, tablet computers, internet TV devices, mobile devices, mobile middleware servers, and the corresponding EIS systems deviate over time as a result of normal business operations. An example of these business operations include membership changes for sets of users. For example, a technical support service call ticket can be reassigned to a different server technician in an EIS, which results in the eviction (i.e., removal) of the previous server technician from a set and the insertion of the newly-assigned server technician into the set. In most cases, something like a work order has a single owner and ambiguity regarding the assigned technician that exists for a long period can be extremely undesirable.
Accordingly, what is desired are improved methods for membership tracking and data eviction to ensure coherency between client user data and enterprise systems.
There are at least two issues that arise from traditional techniques for synchronizing data between mobile clients and enterprise servers. One issue relates to client side data eviction that results in dangling reference data. For example, if a user such as a sales manager chooses to synchronize a different region's data from what he/she currently has on his/her client device, this can result in dangling references such as a product object that was previously synchronized to the device wherein the sales order that referred to the product was subsequently deleted from the device. In another example, sales order items referring to products are synchronized to a mobile with the product data referred to in the sales order. When the sales order is complete and/or deleted from an EIS, the referenced products still linger on the client device. These can be conceptualized as ‘dangling reference data.’ There are two problems caused by dangling reference data. First, the dangling reference data occupies space on the client device and can eventually cause storage bloat and device malfunction when the client device's data store/database is filled. This can be problematic for some clients such as mobile devices that have limited storage space. Second, the dangling reference data is still referenceable by an application program(s) running on the client device via queries and searches (e.g. via a findAll( ) operation), but is stale in that it refers to data that is no longer relevant. Even if the data is updated, new information will not be downloaded to the client.
Another issue that arises from traditional techniques for synchronizing data between mobile clients and enterprise servers is when there are membership changes. For example, a data instance, such as a mobile business object (MBO) instance, may no longer be a member of a set due to a change of set criteria when a synchronization parameter related to a geographic region is changed (i.e., from Los Angeles to San Francisco). In traditional synchronization systems, if a synchronization parameter is changed, associated data from the client of instances that are no longer members of the new set is not automatically removed or evicted.
Accordingly, what is needed are methods to automatically evict data from the client device of instances that are no longer members of the new set. Another example of business operations that result in the need to evict data from sets are subscription changes. Accordingly, what is further desired are methods with the ability to allow users to manipulate their data “subscriptions” directly so that they will be in charge of what data is to be evicted.